02/08/2022
My thoughts from the tractor seat.
Dirty minded.
I’ve always been dirty minded.
Now before you jump to conclusions or your spiritual upbringing wants to report me, or you Bible belters are about to faint or have a stroke… just indulge me for a bit.
I’ve always been an outdoor kid and loved the dirt… it’s been my calling.
As a kid, and even now, I love being outside and in the dirt. The best smells in my opinion come from the outdoors, the smell of fresh plowed earth, newly cut hay, a field of onions or a chile peppers growing, the smell of cotton blowing into a picker basket at harvest… The smell of much needed rain on parched earth, silage in a pile, or the first frost of fall… it all comes from being outside and having a love of dirt.
My love of dirt became my profession and it’s made me dirty minded, subsequently I have learned to take care of my farm… my dirt feeds the world and my family.
There have been numerous outside influences putting out propaganda insinuating those of us in agriculture abuse the land, and it is spilling over into politics. It seems that the google keyboard warriors searching the web want to tell us how to do our job… all because they’ve been feeding on misinformation and lies.
Farmers and ranchers are often blamed for ruining the earth and for the rising cost of food and fiber. Lawmakers are under pressure to regulate everything we do and how we do it. What most folks don’t understand is that we don’t control the prices we receive or the costs of our inputs… we manage the best we can trying to make a living.
That said, It takes profitability in order to farm sustainably. If you can’t make a profit… you start to cut corners. Cutting corners means cutting costs. Sustainability isn’t cheap and comes at a price… and it is often the first cost to get cut in order to survive and pay our bills. You have all seen costs skyrocket lately if you’ve been to the fuel pump and grocery store.
We love our farms and we take care of our land… but if we can’t remain profitable we can’t be sustainable.
I encourage those of you who don’t farm to visit a farmer and learn firsthand what we do and how we do it. Remember man can’t live on megabytes alone… we need farmers.
To my farm family friends, as much as we hate going out into public… it’s something we need to do if we are to survive. Those of us in Ag need to get our stories out, share our dirty minds, dirty stories and your dirty hands… get involved!
If you’re not at the table… you are on the menu.
